Derek and Clive are back – are they too much for the 21st century?

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s relentlessly filthy 70s albums anticipated punk, and influenced both alternative comedy and a generation of smutty teenagers. But is this re-release just too offensive for modern ears?

Dudley Moore, left, and Peter Cook promote the first Derek and Clive album in 1976.
Photograph: Estate of Keith Morris/Redferns

What’s the worst job you ever had? Ask the right (wrong) person and their eyes will light up with mischief and horrible recognition. They have found a kindred spirit. “I had the terrible job,” they will tell you, suddenly slipping into one of those whining, droning, ultra-boring, ultra-cockney accents that you no longer hear in real life, “of retrieving lobsters from up Jayne Mansfield’s arsehole.”

They may go on to inform you of Lady Vera, who can tell your future from your farts, or their schooldays when Sir would get “jolly batey” with them, or the time they earned a crust collecting Winston Churchill’s bogeys, one of which was so huge it stood in for the Titanic (“There was no such THING as the Ti-fucking-tanic!”). They’ll probably be in their 40s and they won’t be able to control themselves laughing. These are the men – and yes, it’s usually men – who were exposed to the comedy albums of Derek and Clive at an impressionable age. And they’re about to go overboard again, for all of this unfathomably filthy material by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is re-released this week in a box set, A Right Pair of C****: The Complete F****** Derek and Clive.

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It is a (vile) body of work that stands alone in the annals of comedy. Derek and Clive are juvenile, relentless, cheerfully disgusting and achingly funny, but their unmatched nihilism stares so deeply into the abyss that they’re almost unbearable to listen to for long stretches. In the witterings of two toilet attendants, you can hear the old head-to-head Pete and Dud sketches – the ones that won Cook and Moore fame and affection on their 1960s BBC2 series Not Only ... But Also – curdling into a thing of genuine darkness.

Even their fans will admit that the Derek and Clive stuff – three largely improvised spoken-word albums recorded between 1973 and 1978 – was truly obscene, a litany of turd jokes, masturbation gags, splattering fart sound effects and liberal use of the C-word for which the term “toilet humour” seems pitifully inadequate. At their worst, as on the ugly second album, Derek and Clive Come Again, the act was a formless, cruel mess and a reflection of the duo’s increasingly toxic relationship. Both were drinking heavily. Cook, deep into alcoholism and fearing to gaze upon his own decline, increasingly took out his frustrations on Moore. At their best, though, they’re a deep dive into British scatology and – paradoxically – a breath of fresh air. They’re the guiltiest guilty pleasure available.

Which raises the question of how they’ll be received in today’s climate. Bluntly, there isn’t enough #problematic in the world to cover Derek and Clive. On Come Again, Moore sings about his mother sucking his penis. On the Sir sketch from the bleak third album, Ad Nauseam (it came with a free sick bag), he plays an excitable and uncomprehending schoolboy relating the time one of the masters sexually abused him.

Not horrified enough? Try Cook laconically saying: “I’ve raped people ... but always in good faith.” Or how about the infamous Soul Time sketch, in which Moore plays exuberant R&B piano while singing: “I’m a nigger and I fucked a white chick”? It won’t get you very far to point out that the victims of paedophilia, rape or racism aren’t the butts of these jokes. The targets, insofar as there are any in Derek and Clive’s world, are your uptight bourgeois sensibilities.

“I consider myself incredibly prudish and very right on,” says comedian Iszi Lawrence, a Derek and Clive fan since her teens, who recalls getting into trouble for singing their Dutch Bitch song at the school piano. “I’m very nearly a social justice warrior myself,” she admits. “But the things that make me really cackle are the most wrong and fucked up. Derek and Clive is supposed to be offensive – if it doesn’t sicken you, it’s failed. Listening to it is not going to turn you into a horrible sexist misogynist rapist. It’s comedy, and I refuse to take comedy that seriously.”

The roots of Derek and Clive lay in Cook and Moore’s complex and increasingly strained relationship during the early 70s. Cook’s problem drinking and collapsing home life fed a resentment towards Moore, the untroubled partner without whom he couldn’t work. This would worsen as Moore struck out on his own and, later, began to make headway in Hollywood.

The outwardly cold and aloof Peter Cook was in fact a sensitive man, easily hurt. His heavy drinking, initially a way to cope with his separation from his children but soon a pursuit in itself, meant that he was often hopelessly drunk onstage during Pete and Dud’s tours. As the late BBC comedy producer Harry Thompson relates in his masterful Peter Cook: A Biography, the old warm double act degenerated into a cruel new dynamic whereby Cook would torment Moore for his own amusement.

Bored during a New York residency in 1973, Cook suggested they try improvising some sketches in a recording studio, purely for their own entertainment. Perhaps they could take the dirtier, unrecorded end of their ad libbed conversations even further. Cook began the recording, in Bell Sound Studios, with words from an old sketch he’d done around the Private Eye office: “I’ll tell you the worst job I ever had ...” Enter Jayne Mansfield and the lobsters, and new personas far removed from TV-friendly Pete and Dud. They were now the seedy toilet attendants Derek (Moore) and Clive (Cook).

In following sessions more bravura filth flowed, including This Bloke Came Up to Me – Derek and Clive repeating one particular insult in a variety of inflections – and the absolutely horrible Winkie Wanky Woo, in which Moore plays a hideous, laryngectomal pervert luring the well-heeled Cook into acts of gross indecency. It was utterly unbroadcastable, but never intended for release anyway.

“This is what people need to understand about Derek and Clive,” says comedian Mitch Benn, of Radio 4’s Now Show. “Originally, none of it was intended to be heard by anyone. They were just doing it for their own nihilistic, cathartic reasons. To me, the original Pete and Dud stuff from TV is funnier but there’s something undeniable about Derek and Clive. This is comedy that’s absolutely liberated from any constraints – even from the constraint of an audience. You can’t call it offensive because they never actually intended anyone to listen to it.”

Cook, however, soon lost interest in this new avenue, too. As the New York show became an American tour, he fell deeper into drink and pills. By the time this increasingly fraught and miserable experience ended, Moore was adamant that the partnership was over, a decision Cook would long harbour as a betrayal.

But studio engineers had kept the Derek and Clive tape. It found its way into New York’s music underground, as part of a bootleg that also featured the infamous Troggs Tapes – the hirsute Andover band arguing in the studio (“Just fucking play it ... you big pranny!”) – and oddments such as Orson Welles auditioning for the role of a frozen pea. Soon bands including the Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had acquired copies and word began to reach Cook and Moore of their new currency with the rock elite, who were always in need of lowbrow entertainment to enliven the tedium of touring. By 1976, cassette copies were, ironically enough, on sale in Private Eye’s classified section. Cook, who had been becalmed and increasingly depressed since he split with Moore, saw an opportunity. Island Records agreed to release the tapes, plus some extras, as Derek and Clive (Live), this a last-minute change from the planned title: Derek and Clive (Dead).

To their amazement the album became a worldwide hit, outselling any previous Pete and Dud LP and shifting more than 100,000 copies in the UK. Its forbidden qualities doubtless helped sales – radio stations everywhere had no choice but to ban it – and the warning on the cover that it should not be played to children was cordially ignored. No fewer than four police forces reported it to the DPP for obscenity. The two comics were once again the focus of attention. Although Moore had vowed never to work with “that man” again, reluctantly he rejoined Cook to promote the album and they begin writing together again.

There was something prophetic in Derek and Clive (Live), too. Though the duo had recorded their skits in 1973, the album chimed with the dirty minded, Uncle Disgusting aspect of punk rock. Derek and Clive’s cottaging sketches, Jamie Reid’s homoerotic Cowboys T-shirt, Malcolm McLaren’s rubber fixation, the strange similarity of Cook and John Lydon’s affectless, nasal voices ... they all signalled a move to the seedy in pop’s shared unconsciousness. Derek and Clive were not just perverted, they were prescient.

“Derek and Clive anticipated the punk sensibility and the later alternative comedy thing, too,” says Benn. “There’s a purity to that sort of extremism that you can see in the Sex Pistols but also in acts like Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson as the Dangerous Brothers – of relentlessly saying and doing everything you’re not supposed to.”

There would be two sequel albums but Derek and Clive proved to be the end of Cook and Moore’s partnership. Cook had become too erratic and Moore’s Hollywood career was on the verge of taking off with 10 and Arthur. “This was the final insult for Peter Cook,” says Benn. “He thought he might be able to make it as a leading man and who gets there instead? His short-arsed mate.”

The disintegration of the relationship can be seen up close in the 1978 film Derek and Clive Get the Horn, which shows the fractious recording of their final album Ad Nauseam. Though Moore is clearly trying to leave, Cook can’t resist tormenting him. “It’s really uncomfortable but still really funny,” says Lawrence. “It’s like watching psychological S&M porn with two out-of-shape white blokes.”

Now the psychodrama is available again, from beginning to end. Will Derek and Clive still resonate in the 21st century? Or are some things just too inappropriately, offensively problematic? It remains to be seen.

“I’m starting to have a real problem with the word ‘problematic’,” fumes Benn. “It’s starting to sound like ‘un-American’. Complaining that Derek and Clive is offensive is like complaining that porn is dirty.

“And anyway, even if people hate it, what are they going to do?” he wonders. “Dig them up?”

• A Right Pair of C****: The Complete F****** Derek and Clive is out now on UMC/Spectrum.